STOICISM AND THE VIRTUE OF TOLERATION

This article argues that the Stoics possessed a conception of toleration as a personal and social virtue. In contrast with previous scholarship, I argue that such a conception of toleration only emerges as a product of the novel conceptions of the virtue of endurance offered by Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. The first section provides a survey of the Stoic conception of endurance in order to demonstrate how the distinctive treatments of endurance in Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius merit classification of a conception of toleration; the second section offers a brief reconstruction of the arguments for toleration in the Meditations.